Honor View 20 Review, Specifications, Price

Honor has launched its new phone honor view 20 in the market. This time honor has invented the new Design at back on the camera and the Finger Print Sensor. The phone was released in China in December 2018, Honor showed the View 20 off to western media at CES – where it earned one of Tech Advisor’s Best of CES 2019 awards – it’s now launched the phone in Europe too, in a launch event in Paris. The View 20 is available in a couple of colors and versions, starting from #499 for the base version. We are sharing detail information on Honor view 20 in this article.

Honor View 20 Specifications

You can purchase the phone outright in the likes Amazon, Very, or Honor itself, while if you’d prefer to grab it on contract, it is accessible from Carphone Warehouse or O2. Buy the phone before 5 February from a participating retailer, and they will even throw in a free Honor Watch Magic – that the company’s new smartwatch. If you are thinking to Purchase honor view 20 then you need to avail this offer.

Our photographs show the Phantom Blue version of the telephone, which comes with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage and prices #579. In individual nations, that version is also available in Phantom Red, but sadly the UK isn’t getting the red edition of this phone. In the UK the Phantom Blue Edition of this telephone is a Carphone Warehouse exclusive till 9 April. The Honor View 10, its predecessor, started at #449, so that is a fairly reasonable increase since this is annual.

Honor view 20 Looks

In all honesty, most of the things that make the View 20 unique come down to its design, as opposed to its specs, with both the front and rear of the unit exciting in their ways.

For the front, you get a punch-hole/pinhole/in-screen camera (take your pick, no-one seems to have determined what to call these yet). The View 20 was not the first telephone to be declared with the notch replacement – Samsung got there with all the A8s – but that the View 20 is coming out in Europe first, and Honor was at pains to point out its camera is an entire 1.5mm smaller, so there is that.

This notch-alternative provides you with a close-to full-screen 6.4in screen – but in practice, it takes up the same amount of screen real estate since the teardrop notches from the likes of the OnePlus 6T, just shifted over to one side and separated slightly from the bezels. Your mileage will vary on whether it’s more or less distracting than a topnotch, but it’s undeniably striking. If you hate it, then you could always switch it off to the software side and then leave a black bar across the top of the display.

And so’s the back of the telephone. Honor’s previous few flagships have played around with interesting reflections and refractions, and the View 20 takes this to an entirely new level with a nanolithographic design that boasts a subtle V-shape running down the whole rear of the phone, without adding any texture to the smooth glass back.

Shift and move the phone around, and it catches the light in all sorts of shades and highlights, particularly in case you go for one of those colored versions of the telephone. Our review unit is your Phantom Blue edition of this telephone, but it is also possible to put it in Phantom Red (sadly unavailable in the UK), or Midnight Black along with the slightly darker Sapphire Blue – though it is well worth remembering the Phantom variations of the phone include marginally higher specs.

There’s a fingerprint sensor on the rear – no in-screen fingerprint tech here, even though Honor included it at the Magic 2 – and also the USB-C port supports USB 3.1 for faster data transfer, although the added cable merely is USB 2.0.

Still, little touches like texturing on the power button to distinguish it from the nearby volume rocker, or the subtle curve to the back edges, add up to make this feel more polished compared to any Honor device so far.

This phone seems lush. Honor telephones are always visually appealing, but the View 20 might be their prettiest nonetheless, and this is an early contender for 2019’s most excellent designed apparatus.

Honor View 20 Processor Performance

Still, looks alone don’t a flagship make. Fortunately, View 20 is no slouch when it comes to specs. Inside you’ll find Huawei’s flagship Kirin 980 processor (the same chip as the Mate 20and Mate 20 Guru ), which means this phone breezes through day-to-day tasks and can handle nearly any high-end mobile game too.

RAM and storage depend slightly on the version you opt for. That means that if you want the higher specs, you are going to have to get the telephone in blue (or red if you’re in a country with that variant ), and if you would like to save money, you are limited to blue and black.

Within our benchmarking the View 20 scored nearly identically to the Mate 20 Guru across the board – unsurprising given the internals – and happily trounced past year’s View 10. Up against major rivals such as the Samsung Galaxy S9 and OnePlus 6T the View 20 still retains its own, especially about the Geekbench CPU test as well as the JetStream browser benchmark – arguably both with the highest relevance for ordinary day-to-day usage. Bear in mind these benchmarks are using the 8GB RAM edition of the phone so that performance may be marginally reduced over the 6GB version.

Honor View20 Display:

The maximum screen brightness of 365cd/m2 is a little lower than we’re utilized to watching from flagships (a compromise for this on-screen camera perhaps?) But realistically it’s rare that you will need to run it up to max anyhow. It’s all nice, but from a hardware perspective this is indeed the phone’s weak link – it is not bad, but it’s not up with there with the big OLED flagships.

Honor View 20 Battery:

In terms of battery life, you’re looking at 4,000mAh, which means this should last most people a couple of days of usage. In the time of writing, I’ve been using the phone for two days and 2 hours, and it is somehow sitting on 42 percent. It’s not been the very last weekend of phone use, but even so, I feel confident in stating the battery life should be more than enough for most of you.

The View 20 also includes Honor’s’supercharging’, though notice that it’s just 22W – not the 45W supercharging of the recent Honor Magic 2. 55 says that the phone will charge to 55 percent in half an hour, and in our testing it actually managed to hit 59 percent at that time – maybe not quite the fastest out then (that goes into the Oppo RX17 Guru ) but nippy. As already noted, there is no wireless charging, so it has wires only we’re afraid.

In terms of software, all of this is running on Android Pie 9.0, with Honor’s Magic UI two on top – the organization’s slightly tweaked version of Huawei’s EMUI. It’s a little clunky occasionally but gives users a decent quantity of freedom without sacrificing ease of use too much, and plenty of consumers discover they prefer it into the stock Android encounter.

Honor View20 Camera:

Those internal specs are impressive, but what Honor wants to push is the View 20’s camera setup – on each side of the phone.

Let us retake the front first. That on-screen camera is packaging 25Mp, so it’s no slouch, and out of using it somewhat, no evidence sitting underneath the display has compromised picture quality in any way. I’d hardly consider myself a fervent selfie taker, but it seems to me that anybody who is would be rather pleased with what the View 20 must offer – mandatory portrait light and beauty effects included.

The back cameras are arguably more interesting, punch-hole aside. The dual detectors are each interesting in their own right: one is the first 48Mp sensor anyone has ever bothered to place to a cellphone camera, while the next is a 3D camera which the phone uses for thickness sensing.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that megapixels are not everything, and this is true where more does not necessarily equal better – and there can be some downsides to super-high pixel counts. However, under the right circumstances, this 48Mp sensor must create some seriously crisp shots, especially with the help of the Kirin 980’s AI picture processing in the dedicated Ultra Clarity and Night modes.

Click through our Flickr gallery, and you’ll see that landscape, and macro shots likewise have come out with excellent detail and color reproduction, while our reduced light test taken is impressively crisp – and that is without Honor’s AI mode allowed, which adds extra color adjustment and post-processing. It tends to make shots appear more striking and Instagram-ready, but the result can be somewhat overblown.

The Ultra Clarity mode here is more intriguing. I’ll confess to being somewhat skeptical going in, but this crop (below) of our St. Pancras test shots show just how much work the Ultra Clarity manner is performing. The enhanced shot on the right features crisper text on such street sign, more definition in the brickwork, and better, brighter color reproduction – and that is all from a somewhat dull London day.

The secondary 3D infrared lens is more of a gimmick. It should aid in improving portrait style, along with a few more niche use instances: artificially slimming you in photographs. You can even create little AR characters that will mimic your moves – essentially a full-body version of Animoji.

There’s not much here to show that a 3D camera is any more than a novelty, and we can’t envision anyone rushing to purchase the phone for it. It’s also not available in the UK however, with a software update promised to unlock the performance – but not for two weeks or so after launch. It doesn’t hurt, and the main lens is more than realized enough to compensate for it anyhow.

Final Verdict
The View 20 is magnificent to look at – from just about any angle, thanks to the one-two punch of the pinhole camera on the front along with the genuinely unique holographic V effect on the glass back. The photos look great, but don’t do this justice – it’s appropriately stunning.

The specs are a lot powerful to match, and comfortably rival much more expensive flagship telephones (like Huawei’s own Mate 20 Pro). And perhaps for the first time, Honor deserves to be in precisely the same conversation as the names when it comes to camera quality.

For possibly the first time, View 20 does not feel like that. Sure, superior features like wireless waterproofing and charging are still lacking, but for most people, those stay nice-to-haves – whereas using the center attributes here Honor is firing on all cylinders.